S&P's opinion on debt ratings should have almost no credibility. S&P is the same private profit-making corporation that was paid tens of millions of dollars by Wall Street banks to rate its toxic subprime mortgages and derivatives, giving them phony AAA ratings.

Step back from the day-to-day, hour-to-hour details of the debt-ceiling negotiations for a minute and look at the bigger picture. Our legislators are being stampeded by a manufactured "crisis" into profoundly changing the nature of our country.

Perhaps Gov. Snyder has forgotten the words of the Pledge of Allegiance. We pledge our allegiance not to the corporate state, not to one party or one ideology, but to the republic, one nation, under God with liberty and justice for all.

To win elections Democrats need to get the economy moving, and you can't do that in a "centrist" way. They should compromise when they must, but this time they need to make it clear that they are compromising.

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine is one of the most important political books of the past decade. But Michael Winterbottom's "adaptation" for film is garbled and mumbled to the point of meaninglessness.